And if you happened to miss our interview with Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, you can check it out here. We share everything from how we got started, our most memorable $0.11 ever and some of our best success strategies!

Can’t Miss Moments This Week:

Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.

The first furniture we have bought in like 10 years haha

We are officially MAC users (we can finally afford them lol)

SPECIAL BONUS: The Flipped Lifestyle Goal Setting Guide

Part of getting Jocelyn on board with my online dreams was to sit down and get on the same page with our goals. We want to help you and your spouse do the same, which is why we created this FREE guide.

We take you step by step through the questions we asked ourselves that led to the success we have achieved today.

Once you go through the guide, come back and share your goals and dreams in the comments for this podcast. The Flipped Lifestyle community will be here to cheer you on as you chase those dreams!

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

You can connect with S&J on social media too!

Thank you for listening!

Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!

If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!

Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!

Jocelyn: Today we’re going to talk about getting your spouse on board when it comes to setting up an online business. For me, it’s particularly interesting because when Shane started with online business in 2012 I was really not on board. It wasn’t because I think online business doesn’t work which he gave me a lot of evidence to the contrary, but it was because I was established in my routine and didn’t want to introduce anything else in it so I wondered if it is really worth it.

[spoiler title=”Click to View Transcript”] I know there are a lot of you who are thinking about online business and maybe you’re just having trouble getting your spouse interested and that this kind of lifestyle is possible and something that normal people can do.

Shane: So for that, we have 5 tips for getting your spouse on board with your online dreams. It’s not just for younger people without kids who can do this and it gets you all fired up to think you can convince your spouse to ride along with you. With us, I was completely obsessed the first month of starting an online business and thinking about what all can be done with it. So I want to talk about 5 things I did to convince Jocelyn that it was possible.

1st – Prove that it can work

Shane: It’s the first thing I recommend anyone do. Remember you are the one who first found the podcast and you will relay second-hand information to your spouse, much like I did but it wasn’t convincing because it wasn’t the successful person who was doing it but me which is why I had to show her some real evidence that it can work for us.

Jocelyn: Shane had heard a podcast about passive income and came in and said that this is something that will change our lives and I didn’t take him seriously. This was in the summer time so in the evening he was reading books, blogs and I wanted to just relax and have some fun.

So Shane starts these websites, like Spencer (who created small sites that made little money but he made a lot of these websites) and Shane believed he could do the same and make it work and started 3-4 websites. It was haphazard and I was thinking that the people who were making this work were smarter and more professional than us and a few weeks later one night we were doing our stuff and Shane tells me that someone has clicked on one of our ads (he had Adsense on one of the websites) and it was a payment of 11 cents and that was enough validation that you can create some digital property (blog, podcast, document) and some random person will either pay money for it or click on an ad just for information you had in your brain on any subject.

Shane: I got so excited that we could do that and started thinking what if we could make as little as $400 a month and Jocelyn was convinced that it was more than just a theory now.

Jocelyn: The first thing I thought was that if Shane can make this work maybe I can make it work too and we started thinking what we could do together.

Shane: But you can’t tell your spouse, “Look at this, it works for them, you’ve got to show how it works for us” and it need not be about making money. You can prove it to your spouse that you can put together a website or make a digital book and say that you’ve made it and now I can try to sell it.

So if you’re really excited about it and convinced that you can do it that’s great but don’t try to bribe your spouse into liking it. Just go ahead and do something to show them that it works and once they’re on board then you can start doing stuff together.

2nd – Discuss with your spouse and get on the same page about your life goals and family

Shane: I had this vision that if we did this, we could quit our jobs and do all sorts of things and I instantly had these dreams in my mind but they weren’t necessarily like Jocelyn’s goals at the time. So I had to step back and have an open dialogue and discussion and see where Jocelyn wanted to go before I could convince her to go anywhere.

Jocelyn: This is actually a powerful exercise. You might think you know each other’s goals but really you probably don’t until you start writing them on paper. We started with our long-term goals, things we wanted to do in 5 years and then things we wanted to do in one year (short-term goals) and also things we wanted to do immediately (right now goals). We actually have created a book for you (which is free) when you go to podcast 6 – it’s called Goal Setting Guide.

Shane: We did this collaboratively and not individually and we discovered a lot of similarities in goals and started thinking how can online business make this possible. Eg – If we get 10 customers to buy our products for $50 then how can that extra $500 a month help us to reach our goals. So don’t assume that your spouse will be as excited as you about anything, you’ve got to have a conversation and convince them.

3rd – Sacrifice what you like to do and not make your spouse sacrifice for it

Shane: I love to play Xbox but when I first discovered online business, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give up on a couple of hours of my Xbox time.

Jocelyn: When Shane was working as a football coach, he was working 12 hours a day, I was working full-time and we had kids and by the time he got home he just wanted to relax and I needed help around. If you want to start an online business, you have to bend a little bit somewhere. When we got serious and thought this online business could work, we gave up our cable TV because every extra moment we had when our children were asleep, we spent that working on our website.

Shane: I realized I was creating conflict because I wanted to come home and play Xbox and then work on the online business and if you create that conflict then there’s no way you can convince your spouse that this is a good thing when the thing you’re trying to show as your family’s future, is causing conflict. That’s not a good starting point. So I didn’t give it up completely but set aside a very specific reduced time for it (so that I don’t sacrifice the relationship with my friends and brother) and also not sacrifice the relationship with Jocelyn in building this online business together. So you may have to give up something you like to do early on to convince your spouse that this is a good thing and that you’re willing to give up other things in your life for it.

Jocelyn: You can’t do everything. We talked about this earlier in time management (podcast 3). You’ve got to make some decisions. Everybody has 168 hours a week so you have to decide what is most important to you and if creating an online business is important to you then you need to put it ahead of other things that are taking up your time.

Shane: You also have to maintain your true priorities, you can’t give up the relationship you have with your spouse. You’ve got to prove that they’re the priority and the reason why you’re doing this.

4th – You can’t shirk your responsibilities

Shane: Maybe you’re responsible for doing the dishes or taking the trash etc, you can’t neglect the things you need to do to get back some time to work on the side on your online business. I used to do that too when I started ignoring the things I need to do in the house in order to focus on my online business. You’ve still got to meet the responsibilities in your relationship.

Jocelyn: And if you don’t that’s just going to create bitterness which will then become more difficult for you to convince your spouse that online business is the way to go.

Shane: Especially, in the beginning, you can’t take it lightly and you can’t stop doing things you need to do around the house and you’ve got to take care of all those responsibilities first before you work on your online business.

Jocelyn: Same thing if you have children, there are some tradeoffs that need to happen. Especially after a long day when we come home and are tired and can’t play with the children and the other person is working on the online business, but we can’t do that.

Shane: I would come home from practice and head straight to the computer to work on it. I was totally ignoring the fact that Jocelyn was tired too from all day.

5th – Don’t force it

Shane: Your spouse is not one to participate. You don’t want to force them to participate, instead, ask for their support and maybe their participation will come later. I did that when I was trying to get Jocelyn around my online business on football but she had no passion for it so I just asked her to step back and watch me do it for a while but when she got a hold of something that interested her that’s when she decided to get into this with me.

Jocelyn: It’s okay to have separate interests. We maintain separate sites and we do bounce ideas off each other but aside from that we have nothing to do with each other’s projects. If you are interested in subjects that are vastly different then go ahead and explore them and when one of the sites take off that’s when you need to decide whether to join forces or to carry on with what’s working separately.

Shane: With this, you’re not trying to force your interest down their throat, you’re allowing them to choose what they want to do in online business if they want to participate and if you choose to work on separate projects you double the chances of one of them taking off. Jocelyn’s first website took off pretty fast so don’t force your spouse to get on with you on your website. If you know something they’re good at or like then you can suggest them to start with that subject.

Jocelyn: You have to be going the same direction at least somewhat. If your partner has been staunchly against online business then it might not work out because you’re going to be want to work together just so there’s no conflict in the marriage.

Shane: So basically if they don’t want to be involved, ask for their support your dream and you have to work in such a way that it doesn’t affect your other responsibilities so you’re also showing them that you care about what they want. This is not a unilateral type of decision that you can make. If you show them that you’re putting them first ahead of your online business then eventually they’ll get on board.

So those were the 5 tips. It’s a very touchy subject that’s hard to negotiate but if you step back and work at it then eventually you’ll be on the same page and work together and get a greater return.

Can’t Miss moments…

Jocelyn: Our computers were not in very good shape, it was smoking etc so we went up to the Apple Store and we were able to take care of all the technological needs we have for our business.

Shane: What she’s trying to say is that we’ve always bought the cheapest computers but because we’ve worked very hard the last 2 years on our online business, we can actually get the tools that we need to get our business to the next level.

Also, we’ve hardly bought furniture since we’ve married. So now we got a brand new bed for our room, this princess bed for Anna. So we were just able to get in a furniture store and buy whatever we liked and it’s because of online business so we could afford the upgrade in furniture.

If you like this podcast, please go to iTunes and leave us a great review, it will help our podcast go to the top of the search results and get our website to more people.

Love the podcast. Really great that you open yourself up and share the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is refreshing to hear how you overcame the challenges of everyday life that we all face. Thank you. I did have a quick question. You mentioned in this podcast that you took courses to help you along the way. Could you share what courses you felt helped you the best or were there any conferences that you attended that gave you a lot of value and really helped propel your business and success. This question may even be a great podcast in and of itself – to share with everyone the courses/conferences and what you took away from each one. Thanks again and keep the podcasts coming.

Great stuff Shane and Jocelyn — this is definitely something my wife and I struggle with and we’re going to try this Goal Setting Guide for sure.

We’re in an odd position where our site is quite successful, but we haven’t ‘burned the boats’ yet, so it still feels like a side business. I have a comfortable job in corporate tax, so it has been tough to take the leap to making this full-time and we just aren’t there yet.

So on some level to my wife it feels like I’m ‘taking time away from the family’ when I spend hours working on the site, but I’m looking at it like I’m building something for the family in the long-run.

It’s essential to be “going in the same direction” as Jocelyn said, and we need to get better for sure.

Thanks again for the podcasts, I’ve been devouring them and all your appearances on the other major sites!

Wow, this episode really resonated with me as I have been trying to convince my wife to participate with me since the beginning and she is not interested. I have proven to her it is possible, as years back when I had my first go at this I had built up to about $10k in annual earnings. She saw the money was there but still wasn’t interested.

Shane, I have made all of the same mistakes that you mentioned, including how I would spend all of my time outside of my day job working on my blogs and products to the detriment of my family. My wife and I would argue about that constantly, and eventually I pulled the plug on everything because it was adding too much grief to our family life.

Recently I am renewing my desire to build an online business, and before listening to this episode I had mentioned to my wife that I had a podcast I wanted her to listen to – thinking that listening to you guys would finally convince her. Her immediate response was that if it was anything to do with online work, she wasn’t interested. However, I do think the process of us defining our goals together will at least give us a better appreciation for what we each want that I think we have probably always glossed over thinking that we already know.